PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 



ELIOT !: 
HARPER 



WEST 
BUTLER 




Class LJ 

Book. J?i 



Copyright If. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 



PRESENT 
COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

SIX PAPERS READ BEFORE THE NATIONAL 
EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION, AT THE SES- 
SIONS HELD IN BOSTON, JULY 6 AND 7, 1903 

BY 

CHARLES W. ELIOT 

PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 

ANDREW F. WEST 

DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 

WILLIAM R. HARPER 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 

PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 




NEW YORK 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1903 



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COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 



CONTENTS 






PAGE 

Publishers' Note ........ vii 



I. A New Definition of the Cultivated 

Man 1 

President Eliot, Harvard University. 
Read Monday evening, July 6, 1903. 

II. The Present Peril to Liberal Educa- 
tion 27 

Dean West, Princeton University. 
Read Monday evening, July 6, 1903. 

III. The Length of the College Course . 45 

President Eliot, Harvard University. 

Dean West, Princeton University. 

President Harper, University of Chicago. 

President Butler, Columbia University. 

Four papers read Tuesday morning, July 
7, 1903. 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



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PUBLISHERS' NOTE 

The six papers printed in this book were 
received with extraordinary interest at the 
time of their delivery last July before the 
National Educational Association in Boston, 
and still continue to be the subject of wide- 
spread public comment. They form a closely 
connected series of short discussions by rep- 
resentative men of leading universities on 
those questions of college education which 
are now arousing the keenest discussion in 
educational circles throughout the land. The 
acute conflict between the rival ideals of 
liberal education, the increasing demands of 
the secondary and professional schools, and 
the consequent problem of the survival of 
the American college, are the grave questions 
involved in the debate. To preserve in 
accessible form these notable discussions of 
the largest and most important educational 
gathering ever held in America, the six 
papers, by permission of their writers, are 
issued in this volume for the first time in 
collected form and in the order in which 
they were delivered. 

November, 1903. 



A NEW DEFINITION OF THE 
CULTIVATED MAN 

BY 

CHARLES W. ELIOT 

PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



A NEW DEFINITION OF THE 
CULTIVATED MAN 1 

To produce the cultivated man, or at least 
the man capable of becoming cultivated in 
after life, has long been supposed to be one 
of the fundamental objects of systematic 
and thorough education. The ideal of gen- 
eral cultivation has been one of the stand- 
ards in education. It is often asked: Will 
the education which a given institution is 
supplying produce the cultivated man? Or, 
can cultivation be the result of a given 
course of study? In such questions there is 
an implication that the education which does 
not produce the cultivated man is a failure, 
or has been misconceived or misdirected. 
Now if cultivation were an unchanging 
ideal, the steady use of the conception as 
a permanent test of educational processes 
might be justified; but if the cultivated 
man of to-day is, or ought to be, a dis- 

1 Read before the National Educational Association at its 
Boston meeting, general session, Monday evening, July 6, 1903. 

3 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

tinctly different creature from the culti- 
vated man of a century ago, the ideal of 
cultivation can not be appealed to as a 
standard without preliminary explanations 
and interpretations. It is the object of this 
paper to show that the idea of cultivation 
in the highly trained human being has 
undergone substantial changes during the 
nineteenth century. 

I ought to say at once that I propose to 
use the term cultivated man in only its good 
sense — in Emerson's sense. In this paper 
he is not to be a weak, critical, fastidious 
creature, vain of a little exclusive informa- 
tion or of an uncommon knack in Latin 
verse or mathematical logic: he is to be a 
man of quick perceptions, broad sympathies, 
and wide affinities, responsive but independ- 
ent, self-reliant but deferential, loving truth 
and candor but also moderation and pro- 
portion, courageous but gentle, not finished 
but perfecting. All authorities agree that 
true culture is not exclusive, sectarian, or 
partisan, but the very opposite; that it is 
not to be attained in solitude, but in society ; 
and that the best atmosphere for culture is 
that of a school, university, academy, or 

4 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

church, where many pursue together the 
ideals of truth, righteousness, and love. 

Here some one may think this process of 
cultivation is evidently a long, slow, artifi- 
cial process. I prefer the genius, the man 
of native power or skill, the man whose 
judgment is sound and influence strong, 
though he can not read or write — the born 
inventor, orator, or poet. So do we all. 
Men have always reverenced prodigious in- 
born gifts, and always will. Indeed, bar- 
barous men always say of the possessors of 
such gifts — these are not men; they are 
gods. But we teachers, who carry on a 
system of popular education, which is by 
far the most complex and valuable inven- 
tion of the nineteenth century, know that 
we have to do, not with the highly gifted 
units, but with the millions who are more 
or less capable of being cultivated by the 
long, patient, artificial training called edu- 
cation. For us and our system the genius 
is no standard, but the cultivated man is. 
To his stature we and many of our pupils 
may in time attain. 

There are two principal differences be- 
tween the present ideal and that which pre- 

5 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

vailed at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century. All thinkers agree that the hori- 
zon of the human intellect has widened 
wonderfully during the past hundred years, 
and that the scientific method of inquiry, 
which was known to but very few when the 
nineteenth century began, has been the 
means of that widening. This method has 
become indispensable in all fields of inquiry, 
including psychology, philanthropy, and re- 
ligion, and, therefore, intimate acquaintance 
with it has become an indispensable element 
in culture. As Matthew Arnold pointed out 
more than a generation ago, educated man- 
kind is governed by two passions — one the 
passion for pure knowledge, the other the 
passion for being of service or doing good. 
Now, the passion for pure knowledge is 
only to be gratified through the scientific 
method of inquiry. In Arnold's phrases, 
the first step for every aspirant to culture 
is to endeavor to see things as they are, or 
" to learn, in short, the Will of God." The 
second step is to make that Will prevail, 
each in his own sphere of action and influ- 
ence. This recognition of science as pure 
knowledge, and of the scientific method as 

6 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

the universal method of inquiry, is the great 
addition made by the nineteenth century to 
the idea of culture. I need not say that 
within that century what we call science, 
pure and applied, has transformed the world 
as the scene of the human drama; and that 
it is this transformation which has com- 
pelled the recognition of natural science as 
a fundamental necessity in liberal education. 
The most convinced exponents and advo- 
cates of humanism now recognize that sci- 
ence is the " paramount force of the modern 
as distinguished from the antique and the 
medieval spirit " (John Addington Sy- 
monds — "Culture") and that "an inter- 
penetration of humanism with science and 
of science with humanism is the condition of 
the highest culture." 

A second modification of the earlier idea 
of cultivation was advocated by Ralph 
Waldo Emerson more, than two generations 
ago. He taught that the acquisition of 
some form of manual skill and the practise 
of some form of manual labor were essen- 
tial elements of culture. This idea has more 
and more become accepted in the systematic 
education of youth; and if we include ath- 

7 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

letic sports among the desirable forms of 
manual skill and labor, we may say that 
during the last thirty years this element of 
excellence of body in the ideal of education 
has had a rapid, even an exaggerated, de- 
velopment. The idea of some sort of bodily 
excellence was, to be sure, not absent in the 
old conception of the cultivated man. The 
gentleman could ride well, dance gracefully, 
and fence with skill; but the modern con- 
ception of bodily skill as an element in 
cultivation is more comprehensive, and in- 
cludes that habitual contact with the exter- 
nal world which Emerson deemed essential 
to real culture. We have lately become 
convinced that accurate work with carpen- 
ters' tools, or lathe, or hammer and anvil, or 
violin, or piano, or pencil, or crayon, or 
camel's-hair brush, trains well the same 
nerves and ganglia with which we do what 
is ordinarily called thinking. We have also 
become convinced that some intimate, sym- 
pathetic acquaintance with the natural ob- 
jects of the earth and sky adds greatly to 
the happiness of life, and that this acquaint- 
ance should be begun in childhood and be 
developed all through adolescence and ma- 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

turity. A brook, a hedgerow, or a garden 
is an inexhaustible teacher of wonder, rev- 
erence, and love. The scientists insist to- 
day on nature-study for children; but we 
teachers ought long ago to have learned 
from the poets the value of this element in 
education. They are the best advocates of 
nature-study. If any here are not convinced 
of its worth, let them go to Theocritus, 
Virgil, Wordsworth, Tennyson, or Lowell 
for the needed demonstration. Let them 
observe, too, that a great need of modern 
industrial society is intellectual pleasures, or 
pleasures which, like music, combine delight- 
ful sensations with the gratifications of 
observation, association, memory, and sym- 
pathy. The idea of culture has always 
included a quick and wide sympathy with 
men; it should hereafter include sympathy 
with Nature, and particularly with its liv- 
ing forms — a sympathy based on some ac- 
curate observation of Nature. The book- 
worm, the monk, the isolated student, has 
never been the type of the cultivated man. 
Society has seemed the natural setting for 
the cultivated person, man or woman; but 
the present conception of real culture con- 
2 9 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

tains not only a large development of this 
social element, but also an extension of in- 
terest and reverence to the animate creation 
and to those immense forces that set the 
earthly stage for man and all related beings. 

Let us now proceed to examine some of 
the changes in the idea of culture, or in the 
available means of culture, which the last 
hundred years have brought about. 

1. The moral sense of the modern world 
makes character a more important element 
than it used to be in the ideal of a cultivated 
man. Now character is formed, as Goethe 
said, in the " stream of the world " — not in 
stillness or isolation, but in the quick-flow- 
ing tides of the busy world, the world of 
nature and the world of mankind. At the 
end of the nineteenth century the world was 
wonderfully different from the world at 
the beginning of that eventful period; and, 
moreover, men's means of making acquaint- 
ance with the world were vastly more ample 
than they were a hundred years earlier. To 
the old idea of culture some knowledge of 
history was indispensable. Now history is 
a representation of the stream of the world, 
or of some little portion of that stream, one 
10 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

hundred, five hundred, two thousand years 
ago. Acquaintance with some part of the 
present stream ought to he more formative 
of character, and more instructive as regards 
external nature and the nature of man, than 
any partial survey of the stream that was 
flowing centuries ago. We have, then, 
through the present means of reporting 
the stream of the world from day to day, 
material for culture such as no preceding 
generation of men has possessed. The cul- 
tivated man or woman must use the means 
which steam and electricity have provided 
for reporting the play of physical forces and 
of human volitions which make the world 
of to-day; for the world of to-day supplies 
in its immense variety a picture of all stages 
of human progress, from the Stone Age, 
through savagery, barbarism, and medieval- 
ism, to what we now call civilization. The 
rising generation should think hard and feel 
keenly, just where the men and women who 
constitute the actual human world are think- 
ing and feeling most to-day. The pano- 
rama of to-day's events is not an accurate 
or complete picture, for history will supply 
posterity with much evidence which is hid- 
11 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

den from the eyes of contemporaries; but it 
is nevertheless an invaluable and a new 
means of developing good judgment, good 
feeling, and the passion for social service, 
or, in other words, of securing cultivation. 
But some one will say the stream of the 
world is foul. True in part. The stream 
is, what it has been, a mixture of foulness 
and purity, of meanness and majesty; but 
it has nourished individual virtue and race 
civilization. Literature and history are a 
similar mixture, and yet are the traditional 
means of culture. Are not the Greek trag- 
edies means of culture? Yet they are full 
of incest, murder, and human sacrifices to 
lustful and revengeful gods. 

2. A cultivated man should express him- 
self by tongue or pen with some accuracy 
and elegance; therefore linguistic training 
has had great importance in the idea of 
cultivation. The conditions of the educated 
world have, however, changed so profoundly 
since the revival of learning in Italy that 
our inherited ideas concerning training in 
language and literature have required large 
modifications. In the year 1400 it might 
have been said with truth that there was but 

12 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

one language of scholars, the Latin, and 
but two great literatures, the Hebrew and, 
the Greek. Since that time, however, other 
great literatures have arisen, the Italian, 
Spanish, French, German, and above all 
the English, which has become incompar- 
ably the most extensive and various and 
the noblest of literatures. Under these cir- 
cumstances it is impossible to maintain that 
a knowledge of any particular literature is 
indispensable to culture. Yet we can not 
but feel that the cultivated man ought to 
possess a considerable acquaintance with the 
literature of some great language, and the 
power to use the native language in a pure 
and interesting way. Thus, we are not sure 
that Robert Burns could be properly de- 
scribed as a cultivated man, moving poet 
though he was. We do not think of Abra- 
ham Lincoln as a cultivated man, master of 
English speech and writing though he was. 
These men do not correspond to the type 
represented by the word cultivated, but be- 
long in the class of geniuses. When we ask 
ourselves why a knowledge of literature 
seems indispensable to the ordinary idea of 
cultivation, we find no answer except this: 
13 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

that in literature are portrayed all human 
passions, desires, and aspirations, and that 
acquaintance with these human feelings, and 
with the means of portraying them, seems to 
us essential to culture. These human quali- 
ties and powers are also the commonest 
ground of interesting human intercourse, 
and therefore literary knowledge exalts the 
quality and enhances the enjoyment of hu- 
man intercourse. It is in conversation that 
cultivation tells as much as anywhere, and 
this rapid exchange of thoughts is by far 
the commonest manifestation of its power. 
Combine the knowledge of literature with 
knowledge of the " stream of the world " 
and you have united two large sources of 
the influence of the cultivated person. The 
linguistic and literary element in cultivation 
therefore abides, but has become vastly 
broader than formerly — so broad, indeed, 
that selection among its various fields is 
forced upon every educated youth. 

3. The next great element in cultivation 
to which I ask your attention is acquaint- 
ance with some parts of the store of knowl- 
edge which humanity in its progress from 
barbarism has acquired and laid up. This 
14 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

is the prodigious store of recorded, ration- 
alized, and systematized discoveries, experi- 
ences, and ideas. This is the store which we 
teachers try to pass on to the rising genera- 
tion. The capacity to assimilate this store 
and improve it in each successive generation 
is the distinction of the human race over 
other animals. It is too vast for any man 
to master, though he had a hundred lives 
instead of one; and its growth in the nine- 
teenth century was greater than in all the 
thirty preceding centuries put together. In 
the eighteenth century a diligent student 
with strong memory and quick powers of 
apprehension need not have despaired of 
mastering a large fraction of this store of 
knowledge. Long before the end of the 
nineteenth century such a task had become 
impossible. Culture, therefore, can no 
longer imply a knowledge of everything — 
not even a little knowledge of everything. 
It must be content with general knowledge 
of some things, and a real mastery of some 
small portion of the human store. Here is 
a profound modification of the idea of cul- 
tivation, which the nineteenth century has 
brought about. What portion or portions 

15 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

of the infinite human store are most proper 
to the cultivated man? The answer must 
be, those which enable him, with his indi- 
vidual personal qualities, to deal best and 
sympathize most with Nature and with 
other human beings. It is here that the pas- 
sion for service must fuse with the passion 
for knowledge. It is natural to imagine 
that the young man who has acquainted 
himself with economics, the science of gov- 
ernment, sociology, and the history of civ- 
ilization in its motives, objects, and methods 
has a better chance of fusing the passion for 
knowledge with the passion for doing good 
than the man whose passion for pure knowl- 
edge leads him to the study of chemical or 
physical phenomena, or of the habits and 
climatic distribution of plants or animals. 
Yet, so intricate are the relations of human 
beings to the animate and inanimate creation 
that it is impossible to foresee with what 
realms of nature intense human interests 
may prove to be identified. Thus the gen- 
eration now on the stage has suddenly 
learned that some of the most sensitive and 
exquisite human interests, such as health or 
disease and life or death for those we love, 
16 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

are bound up with the life histories of para- 
sites on the blood-corpuscles or of certain 
varieties of mosquitoes and ticks. When 
the spectra of the sun, stars, and other lights 
began to be studied, there was not the slight- 
est anticipation that a cure for one of the 
most horrible diseases to which mankind is 
liable might be found in the X-rays. While, 
then, we can still see that certain subjects 
afford more obvious or frequent access to 
means of doing good and to fortunate inter- 
course with our fellows than other subjects, 
we have learned from nineteenth-century 
experience that there is no field of real 
knowledge which may not suddenly prove 
contributory in a high degree to human hap- 
piness and the progress of civilization, and 
therefore acceptable as a worthy element in 
the truest culture. 

4. The only other element in cultivation 
which time will permit me to treat is the 
training of the constructive imagination. 
The imagination is the greatest of human 
powers, no matter in what field it works — 
in art or literature, in mechanical invention, 
in science, government, commerce, or relig- 
ion; and the training of the imagination is, 

17 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

therefore, far the most important part of 
education. I use the term constructive im- 
agination because that implies the creation 
or building of a new thing. The sculptor, 
for example, imagines or conceives the per- 
fect form of a child ten years of age ; he has 
never seen such a thing, for a child perfect 
in form is never produced; he has only seen 
in different children the elements of perfec- 
tion, here one element and there another. 
In his imagination he combines these ele- 
ments of the perfect form, which he has 
only seen separated, and from this picture 
in his mind he carves the stone, and in the 
execution invariably loses his ideal — that is, 
falls short of it or fails to express it. Sir 
Joshua Reynolds points out that the painter 
can picture only what he has somewhere 
seen; but that the more he has seen and 
noted the surer he is to be original in his 
painting, because his imaginary combina- 
tions will be original. Constructive imagi- 
nation is the great power of the poet as well 
as of the artist; and the nineteenth century 
has convinced us that it is also the great 
power of the man of science, the investi- 
gator, and the natural philosopher. What 
18 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

gives every great naturalist or physicist his 
epoch-making results is precisely the im- 
aginative power by which he deduces from 
the masses of fact the guiding hypothesis 
or principle. 

The educated world needs to recognize 
the new varieties of constructive imagina- 
tion. Dante gave painful years to picturing 
on many pages of his immortal Comedy of 
Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise the most 
horrible monsters and tortures and the most 
loathsome and noisome abominations that 
his fervid imagination could concoct out of 
his own bitter experiences and the manners 
and customs of his cruel times. Sir Charles 
Lyell spent many laborious years in search- 
ing for and putting together the scattered 
evidences that the geologic processes by 
which the crust of the earth has been made 
ready for the use of man have been, in the 
main, not catastrophic, but gradual and 
gentle, and that the forces which have been 
in action through past ages are, for the 
most part, similar to those we may see to- 
day eroding hills, cutting canons, making 
placers, marshes, and meadows, and form- 
ing prairies and ocean floors. He first 
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PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

imagined, and then demonstrated, that the 
geologic agencies are not explosive and 
cataclysmal, but steady and patient. These 
two kinds of imagination — Dante's and 
Lyell's — are not comparable, but both are 
manifestations of great human power. 
Zola, in La Bete Humaine, contrives that 
ten persons, all connected with the railroad 
from Paris to Havre, shall be either mur- 
derers or murdered, or both, within eighteen 
months ; and he adds two railroad slaughters 
criminally procured. The conditions of 
time and place are ingeniously imagined, 
and no detail is omitted which can heighten 
the effect of this homicidal fiction. Con- 
trast this kind of constructive imagination 
with the kind which conceived the great 
wells sunk in the solid rock below Niagara 
that contain the turbines that drive the 
dynamos that generate the electric force 
that turns thousands of wheels and lights 
thousands of lamps over hundreds of square 
miles of adjoining territory; or with the 
kind which conceives the sending of human 
thoughts across three thousand miles of 
stormy sea instantaneously on nothing more 
substantial than ethereal waves. There is no 
20 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

crime, cruelty, or lust about these last two 
sorts of imagining. No lurid fire of hell or 
human passion illumines their scenes. They 
are calm, accurate, just, and responsible, 
and nothing but beneficence and increased 
human well-being results from them. There 
is going to be room in the hearts of twen- 
tieth-century men for a high admiration of 
these kinds of imagination, as well as for 
that of the poet, artist, or dramatist. 

Another kind of imagination deserves a 
moment's consideration — the receptive im- 
agination which entertains and holds fast 
the visions which genius creates or the 
analogies of nature suggest. A young 
woman is absorbed for hours in conning the 
squalid scenes and situations through which 
Thackeray portrays the malign motives and 
unclean soul of Becky Sharp. Another 
young woman watches for days the pair- 
ing, nesting, brooding, and foraging of 
two robins that have established home and 
family in the notch of a maple near her 
window. She notes the unselfish labors of 
the father and mother for each other and 
for their little ones, and weaves into the 
simple drama all sorts of protective instincts 
21 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

and human affections. Here are two em- 
ployments for the receptive imagination. 
Shall systematic education compel the first 
but make no room for the second? The in- 
creasing attention to nature-study suggests 
the hope that the imaginative study of hu- 
man ills and woes is not to be allowed to 
exclude the imaginative study of Nature, 
and that both studies may count toward 
culture. 

It is one lesson of the nineteenth century, 
then, that in every field of human knowl- 
edge the constructive imagination finds play 
— in literature, in history, in theology, in 
anthropology, and in the whole field of 
physical and biological research. That 
great century has taught us that, on the 
whole, the scientific imagination is quite as 
productive for human service as the literary 
or poetic imagination. The imagination of 
Darwin or Pasteur, for example, is as high 
and productive a form of imagination as 
that of Dante, or Goethe, or even Shake- 
speare, if we regard the human uses which 
result from the exercise of imaginative pow- 
ers, and mean by human uses not merely 
meat and drink, clothes and shelter, but also 

22 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

the satisfaction of mental and spiritual 
needs. We must, therefore, allow in our 
contemplation of the cultivated man a large 
expansion of the fields in which the culti- 
vated imagination may be exercised. We 
must extend our training of the imagination 
beyond literature and the fine arts, to his- 
tory, philosophy, science, government, and 
sociology. We must recognize the prodig- 
ious variety of fruits of the imagination that 
the nineteenth century has given to our race. 
It results from this brief survey that the 
elements and means of cultivation are much 
more numerous than they used to be; so 
that it is not wise to say of any one acquisi- 
tion or faculty — with it cultivation becomes 
possible, without it impossible. The one 
acquisition or faculty may be immense, and 
yet cultivation may not have been attained. 
Thus it is obvious that a man may have a 
wide acquaintance with music, and possess 
great musical skill and that wonderful im- 
aginative power which conceives delicious 
melodies and harmonies for the delight of 
mankind through centuries, and yet not be 
a cultivated man in the ordinary accepta- 
tion of the words. We have met artists who 

23 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

were rude and uncouth, yet possessed a high 
degree of technical skill and strong powers 
of imagination. We have seen philanthro- 
pists and statesmen whose minds have 
played on great causes and great affairs, 
and yet who lacked a correct use of their 
native language, and had no historical per- 
spective or background of historical knowl- 
edge. 

On the other hand, is there any single 
acquisition or faculty which is essential to 
culture, except indeed a reasonably accurate 
and refined use of the mother tongue? 

Again, though we can discern in different 
individuals different elements of the perfect 
type of cultivated man, we seldom find com- 
bined in any human being all the elements 
of the type. Here, as in painting or sculp- 
ture, we make up our ideal from traits 
picked out from many imperfect individuals 
and put together. We must not, therefore, 
expect systematic education to produce mul- 
titudes of highly cultivated and symmetric- 
ally developed persons; the multitudinous 
product will always be imperfect, just as 
there are no perfect trees, animals, flowers, 
or crystals. 

24 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

It has been my object to point out that 
our conception of the type of cultivated 
man has been greatly enlarged, and on the 
whole exalted, by observation of the experi- 
ences of mankind during the last hundred 
years. Let us as teachers accept no single 
element or kind of culture as the one essen- 
tial; let us remember that the best fruits 
of real culture are an open mind, broad 
sympathies, and respect for all the diverse 
achievements of the human intellect at what- 
ever stage of development they may actually 
be — the stage of fresh discovery, or bold 
exploration, or complete conquest. Let us 
remember that the moral elements of the 
new education are individual choice of stud- 
ies and career among a great, new variety 
of studies and careers, early responsibility 
accompanying this freedom of choice, love 
of truth now that truth may be directly 
sought through rational inquiry, and an 
omnipresent sense of social obligation. 
These moral elements are so strong that the 
new forms of culture are likely to prove 
themselves quite as productive of morality, 
high-mindedness, and idealism as the old. 



25 



THE PRESENT PERIL TO 
LIBERAL EDUCATION 

BY 

ANDREW F. WEST 

DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 



THE PRESENT PERIL TO 
LIBERAL EDUCATION 1 

Liberal, education, like political liberty, 
is always worth preserving and always in 
peril. In such causes, if anywhere, men 
need to be ever resolute as well as intelli- 
gent, for only thus does it become possible, 
even when distressed, to face grave crises 
without becoming for an instant pessimistic, 
inasmuch as the priceless value of what we 
are seeking to defend assures us that our 
efforts are well worth making and that no 
effort is too great in maintaining so good 
a cause. 

We have such a cause to-day, the cause of 
liberal education. I need not argue in this 
presence that as it prevails our American 
life is lifted, and that as it fails our Ameri- 
can life is degraded. It is to-day, as ever, 
in peril, but in unusual peril as embodied 

1 Read before the National Educational Association at its 
Boston meeting, general session, Monday evening, July 6, 
1903. 

29 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

in its noblest representative, the American 
college. 

Let us picture the situation in its worst 
possible outcome. Suppose the chances are 
that the college is to fail, to be crushed out 
between the upper and nether millstones of 
professional and secondary schools by rea- 
son of the violent demand for something 
more " practical." What then? If it must 
go, it must go, of course. But ought it to 
go? And if not, ought it to go without a 
struggle? Those who know most about col- 
leges think not, while those who know least 
about them — and they form a huge major- 
ity — are often indifferent and sometimes 
hostile. Scarcely one in a hundred of our 
young men of college age has gone to col- 
lege. This little band of alumni, at least, 
is with the college, and so is the rest of the 
better intelligence of the land. But edu- 
cated intelligence does not always prevail 
over ignorance, even in deciding matters of 
education. One can hardly fail, when paint- 
ing the danger at its blackest, to recall the 
great words of Stein, when appealing to his 
fellow Prussians in the Napoleonic wars: 
" We must look the possibility of failure 
30 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

firmly in the face, and consider well . . . 
that this contest is begun less in regard to 
the probability of success than to the cer- 
tainty that without it destruction is not to 
be avoided." 

It is by no means as black as that, nor 
does it seem likely to become so. But even 
if the peril were far greater than it is, there 
would be no good reason why we should 
not continue the struggle. There is good 
reason to believe the forces with us are 
strong enough, not only to save, but to 
strengthen the American college, and that 
when once its real value is brought home 
anew to the minds and consciences of men, 
it will assert its rights with ample power. 

Let us think for a moment of what the 
American college is. It has been evolved 
out of our own needs and has proved its 
extraordinary usefulness by a long record. 
It has been democratic in its freedom of 
access and in the prevailing tone of its life. 
It has furnished our society and state with 
a small army of well-trained men. In it 
supremely are centered our best hopes for 
liberal education, both as focused in the col- 
lege itself and as radiating outward on the 

31 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

secondary schools below and the professional 
schools above. It is the best available safe- 
guard against the mechanical cramping of 
an unliberalized technical education. It is 
our one available center of organization for 
true universities. It has produced a class 
of men unequaled in beneficent influence by 
any other class of equal numbers in our 
history. 

In the rush of American life it has stood 
as the quiet and convincing teacher of 
higher things. It has been preparing young 
men for a better career in the world by 
withdrawing them a while from the world 
to cultivate their minds and hearts by con- 
tact with things intellectual and spiritual 
in a society devoted to those invisible things 
on which the abiding greatness of our life 
depends. By reason of this training most 
college men have become better than they 
would have been, and better in important 
respects than they could have been, had they 
not gone to college. Their vision has been 
cleared and widened, and their aims have 
been elevated. Not least of all, they have 
been taught incessantly the lesson, so deeply 
needed to steady them in our fiercely prac- 
32 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

tical surroundings, that the making of a 
good living is not so important as the mak- 
ing of a good life. The college has proved 
its right to live. To preserve, maintain, and 
energize it to its highest capacity for good, 
to prune its excesses, strengthen its weak 
places and supply its needs is therefore the 
bounden duty of those who care for the best 
interests of our nation. 

The perils which beset it come from vari- 
ous sources — first, from the common defects 
of our American civilization ; second, from 
the weaker tendencies in young men; and 
third, from the confusion of counsels inside 
the college itself. The first two we must 
be prepared to encounter always, but the 
last one ought to be avoidable. 

This is no place to draw up a catalogue 
of our common defects as a people. Our 
virtues we know well. They are self-reli- 
ance, quick ingenuity, adventurousness, and 
a buoyant optimism. Our national faults 
are not so pleasant to think of — as, for ex- 
ample, the faults of boastful vulgarity and 
reckless excitability. Yet there are some 
that must be mentioned as being specially 
perilous to our college education. The chief 
33 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

one, I think, is commercialism, the feverish 
pursuit of what " pays " as the one end of 
life. Are we not subjected to-day, as never 
before, to demands for teaching the things 
of commerce as part of the college course? 
And are not the mechanical arts and crafts, 
admirable indeed in their true uses, trying 
to mix in with the other things as though 
they were of the same family of studies, and 
saying they must have room in the same 
house even if other members of the family 
are pushed out. Are not technical studies 
being called liberal, and is not eA^en the 
technique of the professions sometimes la- 
beled liberal also, on the plea that all knowl- 
edge is liberalizing? So it is, but in what 
differing degrees and senses! The instinct 
for the useful is being perverted and ex- 
alted above the love of knowledge as a chief 
end. And why? Because what is wanted 
is something immediately, obviously, almost 
mercenarily useful. Is it not time we read 
again the books of philosophy to learn again 
that the true utility is the long utility which 
serves to make a whole life useful, and that 
it is the end for which men live that makes 
them useful or useless ? Do we not feel that 
34 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

we are here coming close to the sanctions of 
religion and need to answer that deep ques- 
tion, What shall it profit a man? once more. 
Another peril is a companion and natural 
follower of commercialism, namely, illiter- 
acy. Not in the meaning of that word in 
the census tables, but in the meaning of 
ignorance of good literature. " No man 
can serve books and mammon," said Richard 
de Bury long ago. Is it not a fact that the 
majority of college students to-day are not 
familiar with the commonplaces of literary 
information and the standard books of his- 
tory, poetry, and so on. Do they know that 
greatest book of our tongue, the English 
Bible, as their fathers did? What have so 
many of them been reading? The news- 
papers, of course, and fiction — not always 
the better fiction. As between books and 
the short stories in magazines, how few read 
the former! I am not now speaking of the 
hard books of philosophy and science, or 
generally of the books that involve severe 
thought, but of the readable, delightful 
books, the pleasant classics of English. 
What a confession of the state of things it 
is that colleges have to make the reading of 
35 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

a few books of English literature a set task 
as an entrance requirement, and then ask 
formal questions on what ought to be the 
free and eager reading of every boy at 
home. How far it is true that the advocacy 
of teaching science may have operated, not 
to beget a taste for science, but merely a 
neglect of literature, is perhaps idle to ask. 
It is at least true that these neglecters of 
literature are not usually giving laborious 
hours to reading scientific works. Perhaps 
some day our schools generally will get 
" Headers " that have literature in them, and 
that will help matters a little. But the so- 
called students who do not care to read, or 
do not know how to read as all students 
should, are with us in abundance as an ever- 
present peril. The quiet book by the quiet 
lamp is a good charmer. Here the true 
student forms his friendships with the mas- 
ters of thought and fancy; here they speak 
to him not under the constraints of the class- 
room; here he may relax without weakness, 
adventure without limit, soar without fear, 
and hope without end. It is the old story. 
Books are, as Huxley put it, " his main 
helpers," and the free reading outside the 
36 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

set tasks is, perhaps next to music, his most 
ennobling pleasure. The loss of this is to- 
day the thing that does so much to deprive 
our college life and conversation of the fine 
flavor of that much misunderstood thing, 
Culture. 

Another peril comes from the students 
themselves. It is a disposition to do the 
pleasant rather than the hard thing, even 
when the hard thing happens to be the best 
thing. This is most common among those 
whose main interest in college life is social. 
It is also fostered by the general absorption 
in athletics, though it is not so much the 
athletes who are affected — for they are at 
least used to a vigorous discipline in things 
physical — as it is the mass of onlookers who 
attend the games and waste so much time 
discussing them. This social and athletic 
environment, with all its undeniable and, I 
believe, indispensable good, is just now do- 
ing much harm to the intellectual life of 
students. Because it is unduly exaggerated 
it is operating powerfully to disperse the 
student's energies in a miscellany of things 
outside his studies. Things which should 
come second, as the relaxation of those whose 
37 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

first business is study, often come first, and 
studies must get what they can of what is 
left. How natural it is that such students 
should crowd into the easier courses. They 
have little interest left for anything intel- 
lectual. So far as this occurs, liberal edu- 
cation dies and college students come to 
their manhood with men's bodies and boys' 
minds. What is being lost is the develop- 
ment of virile intellectual power, a thing 
which simply can not grow without exercise. 
This is a matter which goes far below the 
question of one or another plan of studies, 
though it is greatly affected by the relative 
wisdom or unwisdom of what the student 
is offered. If he finds a course which im- 
pels him and his comrades to regular effort 
day by day, and also gives him the immense 
help that comes to all young men of ordi- 
nary abilities from moving together with 
their fellows in the same direction, his prog- 
ress in studies is part of the orderly advance 
of a march, with little chance for straggling 
or loitering. If he is confused by failure 
to discover that there is a rational order of 
studies or that his college believes there is 
at least some preferable order for the mass 

38 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

of students, he thus loses much or all of a. 
kind of help he ought to have. If the edu- 
cated experience of his college can not tell 
him, at least approximately, what things he 
ought to take and some definite things which 
all college students ought to take, how is he 
to find out with any strong probability that 
he is going straight on the right road? 
Those who are so ready to move an indefinite 
distance along any of the diverging direc- 
tions of elective freedom may well pause to 
ask whether the keen words of Descartes on 
progress in knowledge are not worth heed- 
ing in this connection: " It is better to go a 
short distance on the right road than a long 
distance on the wrong one." 

The love of freedom from control and of 
pleasure in our labor are splendid things. 
They are at once the charm and peril of stu- 
dent effort. The true freedom of the hu- 
man spirit is the true end of the college 
course. This is not injured, however, by 
creating places where students may go, if 
they will, and where they must take some 
subjects of study which experience shows to 
be eminently fitted in their combination to 
serve this very end. We are asking simply 
39 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

for some of the central truths of history, 
literature, science, and philosophy, what 
Locke called the " teeming truths, rich in 
store, with which they furnish the mind, and 
like the lights of heaven are not only beau- 
tiful and entertaining in themselves, but 
give light and evidence to other things that 
without them could not be seen or known." * 
And as for the element of pleasure, why 
should we not desire it? How exquisitely 
did Aristotle say, " Pleasure perfects labor, 
even as beauty crowns youth." 2 Not the 
idle pleasure, however, but the achieved 
pleasure, the deep pleasure that comes from 
noble mastery, from winning on the hard- 
fought field of athletics of the mind, and, 
above all, from winning in the fight against 
intellectual sloth and easy-going indulgence 
— this is the crown of our best young college 
manhood. 

A few words must suffice to set forth an- 
other peril which especially besets us at this 
time. It is the peril of confusion in college 
counsels. It has been inevitable because of 
the extreme diversity of educational condi- 

1 Of the Conduct of the Human Understanding, 43. 
2 Ethics, x, 4, 8. 

40 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

tions in our land and because of conflicting 
theories of college training. 

The pole of law and the pole of freedom 
are the two contrasted standpoints, with 
many a halting-place between. It is, of 
course, clear that any attempt to cast all 
our colleges in one mold is foredoomed to 
failure. We must seek some other remedy. 
But if the present confusion can not be 
cured, the colleges will be seriously and per- 
manently weakened. Here at least we must 
do something, and do it soon. The colleges 
must at all events do one thing, and that is 
to make it as clear as possible what it is they 
are severally seeking to accomplish. Cer- 
tain very practical questions need to be 
answered. They are questions of the sub- 
stance and aim of liberal education. 

One of the questions is, Should a college 
exact a substantial amount of prescribed 
studies for its degree? , If so, there is room 
to organize one or more bachelor's degrees 
according to the types now slowly, though 
imperfectly, evolving in our time. If not, 
the free elective plan with one bachelor's 
degree is the true alternative. There are 
many halting-places between, but none of 
4 41 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

them is a resting-place. Here, then, is a 
basis of clear division without confusion, and 
one that plain folk can understand. The 
nature of the answer given will depend on 
whether or no a given college believes that 
there are substantial studies above the stage 
of our preparatory schooling which are 
essential to the best liberal education. In- 
termediate or minimizing positions on this 
question will result in corresponding vague- 
ness and uncertainty in organization, and 
will tend to perpetuate the confusion. It is 
worth sacrificing something, even in a tran- 
sitional stage, for the sake of the assured 
gain that accrues to a well-defined plan. If 
it turns out to be a wrong plan, its defects 
become visible sooner and may be more 
promptly amended. 

Let us ask a second question. Is there or 
is there not a proper field of college studies, 
exclusive of the fields of secondary, techni- 
cal, and professional learning? If so, such 
studies alone should constitute the college 
course. If not, studies from the other fields 
may be brought in. It will not do to say 
no sharp line can be drawn between fields of 
education for the reason that the domain 
42 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

of knowledge is one, and all knowledge is 
liberalizing. Follow this Out consistently, 
and important distinctions, needed to effect 
a working scheme of division for the parts 
of education, are obscured. We may dis- 
tinguish between great regions, even though 
we are unable to settle all boundary disputes. 
There are enough college studies of undis- 
putedly and eminently liberal character to 
fill the college course to repletion. Let 
those who believe this organize accordingly, 
and let those who believe that any respect- 
able study possible to students of college age 
may be put in the college course, put such 
studies in. The two kinds of colleges will 
then be distinctly discernible. 

If the college is to prevail, the confusion, 
though not necessarily a division of coun- 
sels, must cease. The two opposing tend- 
encies indicate the two available lines for at 
least making the division clear to the coun- 
try at large. Intermediate positions are 
unstable and transitional. They make con^ 
fusion. What parents, teachers and stu- 
dents need to know as definitely as possible 
is precisely what it is a given college stands 
for. Uncertainty here breeds loss of con- 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

fidence in liberal education. It is to be 
hoped that most of the colleges will be able 
to stand together. If they do, I hope and 
believe they will stand for the conviction 
that there are college studies essential for all 
who take the college course, that it is the 
completion of these which opens to the stu- 
dent the best all-round view of the knowl- 
edge most serviceable for his whole after 
life, and that the ideas of discipline and 
duty, in studies as well as in conduct, under- 
lie any real development of the one true 
freedom of the human spirit. 



44 



THE LENGTH OF THE 
COLLEGE COURSE 

BY 

CHARLES W. ELIOT 

PRESIDENT OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



THE LENGTH OF THE 
COLLEGE COURSE 1 

The period devoted to professional edu- 
cation has been more than doubled within the 
last forty years in the United States, except 
in the divinity schools, where three years 
were early required and are still required. 
In Judge Story's law school at Harvard the 
period of residence was eighteen months. 
It is now three years. In 1869-70 the period 
of required residence in the Harvard Med- 
ical School was four months in each of three 
years. It is now nine months in each of 
four years. This tendency to increase the 
period of professional instruction has by no 
means exhausted itself; and, inasmuch as 
the amount of professional knowledge and 
skill to be acquired by every student is 
steadily increasing, we must expect more 
and more time to be devoted to professional 

1 A paper read before the Department of Higher Education 
of the National Educational Association, at Boston, July 7, 
1903. 

47 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

education. This tendency is by no means 
to be regretted. The advanced studies of 
professional schools supply a better training 
than the elementary studies of school and 
college; and they are generally pursued by 
the professional student with greater zeal 
and energy than either schoolboys or college 
students manifest ; but, inasmuch as it is the 
interest of society and the interest of the in- 
dividual that young men should be enabled 
to enter, well trained, on the practise of a 
profession by the time they are twenty-five 
years old, it follows that the period of train- 
ing preliminary or preparatory to profes- 
sional training should come to its end by the 
time the young men are twenty-one years 
old. 

If we ask, next, at what age a boy who 
has had good opportunities may best leave 
his secondary school — whether a high school 
in a city, or a country academy, or an en- 
dowed or private school for the sons of 
well-to-do parents — the most reasonable an- 
swer is at the age of eighteen. At that age 
the average boy is ready for the liberty of a 
college or technical school, and will develop 
more rapidly in freedom than under the 
48 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

constant supervision of parents or school- 
masters. Seventeen is, for the average boy, 
rather young for college freedom, though 
safe for steady boys of exceptional matu- 
rity. Between the secondary school and the 
professional school, then, there can be, as a 
rule, only three years for the college. The 
American colleges have been peculiar in ex- 
pecting so long a residence as four years. 
For the B. A. degree Oxford and Cam- 
bridge have required residence during only 
three years, and during much less than one- 
half of each of those years. Even the honor 
men at Cambridge are in residence, as a 
rule, but three years. Until recent years the 
American colleges doubtless needed four 
years because of the inadequacy of the 
secondary schools. These schools having 
steadily improved, and taken on themselves 
more and more of the preliminary training 
of well-educated youth, it is natural that the 
colleges should now be able to relinquish, 
without lowering their own standards, a por- 
tion of the time which they have heretofore 
claimed. What portion, is an interesting 
question. In the Latin countries the A. B. 
is given at the end of the secondary school 

49 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

course. In Germany the college course and 
the degree of A. B. have disappeared alto- 
gether. On this point I confine myself to 
stating what answer the Harvard Faculty 
have given to this question about the relin- 
quishment of a portion of the time hereto- 
fore devoted to the college. The principle 
on which the Harvard Faculty have acted 
is this: They propose, in reducing the time 
required for the A. B. degree to three years, 
to make no reduction whatever in the 
amount of work required for that degree. 
In other words, they propose that the degree 
of A. B., taken in three years, shall repre- 
sent the same amount of attainment, or 
power acquired, which the A. B. taken in 
four years has heretofore represented. Un- 
der the conditions which obtain at Harvard 
there is no difficulty whatever in bringing 
about this result. In the first place the Fac- 
ulty have already pushed back into the sec- 
ondary schools a good deal of work of 
proper school grade which used to be done 
in the college. Secondly, the Faculty re- 
quire the young man who takes his degree 
in three years to pass exactly the same num- 
ber of examinations on the same number of 
50 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

courses as are required of the man who takes 
the degree in four years. This demand can 
be readily met by the student, because the 
long summer vacations can be utilized, and 
the ordinary pace or rate of work of the 
student in the four-years' course can be con- 
siderably accelerated by the ambitious man 
who proposes to take his degree in three 
years. There are three months and two- 
thirds of vacation at Harvard in every aca- 
demic year — a superfluous amount. The 
standard of work in the four-years' course 
for the Harvard A. B. was decidedly lower 
than the standard of work in any of the 
Harvard professional schools. It is one of 
the advantages of the three-year plan that 
it raises this standard of work during the 
college residence. Pursuing this general 
policy that the requirements for the A. B. 
are not to be diminished, the Harvard Fac- 
ulty fixes the minimum regular residence 
for the Harvard A. B. at three years. They 
do not believe that the residence can be re- 
duced to two years without diminishing the 
amount of work required for the degree. 
At several different times it was proposed 
in the Harvard Faculty that they adopt the 

51 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

principle of counting the first year spent in 
one of the professional schools toward the 
degree of A. B., as well as toward the de- 
gree of the professional school; but the 
Faculty always rejected that proposal, on 
the ground that this method implied a re- 
duction of one-quarter in the requirements 
for the degree of A. B., and indeed of more 
than one-quarter, because the senior year 
ought to be a better year than the freshman 
year. To accentuate this determination not 
to abate the requirements for the degree of 
A. B., while shortening the period of resi- 
dence, the Faculty for some years required 
persons who were to take the degree in three 
years to obtain higher marks or grades than 
were required of persons who took the de- 
gree in four years. This particular require- 
ment has now been removed; but it was 
useful during the years of transition, be- 
cause it made it evident that the three-years' 
man, on the average, had made greater 
attainments than the average four-years' 
man. The governing boards of the Univer- 
sity have had precisely the same intentions 
as the Faculty; so that insistence on the 
previous sum of the attainments for the de- 
52 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

gree is the characteristic feature of the evo- 
lution at Harvard. The result has been 
brought about by the use of the Harvard 
admission examinations to raise the stand- 
ards of the secondary schools, by the utiliza- 
tion of parts of the long summer vacation, 
and by encouraging students to put more 
work into the day and into the year while 
they are in residence for the A. B. 

The Harvard Faculty have endeavored 
to hold fast to the actual facts of the case. 
They say nothing about an A. B. in five 
years, because none but men in some way 
disabled spend five years in getting a bache- 
lor's degree. They do not try to bring boys 
to college in large number at sixteen or 
seventeen years of age; but they have for 
years advised that they come at eighteen 
instead of nineteen. They offer the bache- 
lor's degree in three years or three and a 
half years, instead of four years, because 
many students can win the degree in these 
shorter periods of residence without any 
lowering of the standard. In short, they 
propose to hold everything they have won 
for the college and the degree of Bachelor 
of Arts, and to meet the claims of pro- 
53 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

fessional education by better organization 
of the whole course of education from be- 
ginning to end, by better methods of teach- 
ing, and by large and early freedom of 
choice among different studies. 

While this change was going on in Har- 
vard College, the University took the im- 
portant step of requiring the A. B. for 
admission to its three oldest professional 
schools, first in the Divinity School, then in 
the Law School, and lastly in the Medical 
School. It had already established the 
Graduate School in Arts and Sciences, for 
admission to which a preliminary degree 
was, of course, required. It is unnecessary 
to point out that this action gives the strong- 
est possible support to the A. B. If taken 
by the leading universities of the country at 
large, it would settle at once in the affirma- 
tive the question of the continued existence 
of the American college. To preserve the 
college the sure way is to keep down the 
age for leaving the secondary school, ab- 
breviate the college course to three years, 
and require the A. B. for admission to uni- 
versity professional schools. Then we may 
avoid what has happened in all the nations 
54 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

of Continental Europe, namely, the disap- 
pearance of the college course for the A. B. 

The requirement of the degree of Bach- 
elor of Arts for admission to the profes- 
sional schools has the happiest effect on the 
whole course of professional study. The 
classes in the professional schools become at 
once more homogeneous in quality, and that 
quality is distinctly higher than before. To 
believe that any other result were possible 
would be to discredit the college course 
itself. 

The objections to this very decided im- 
provement are two. It is alleged, in the first 
place, that the professional schools of the 
universities can not bear the reduction in 
their number of students which would fol- 
low the enforcement of this requirement. 
Doubtless there would be some temporary 
diminution in the number of students; but 
the experience at Harvard shows that this 
reduction would be only temporary. The 
reduction is lessened if four or five years' 
notice of the change is given. After a few 
years the reduction would be overcome. In- 
deed, in the Harvard. Law School the num- 
ber of students rapidly increased after the 

55 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

requirement of a degree for admission to the 
school. As a rule, the men already engaged 
in the practise of a profession approve and 
actively support all measures which tend to 
raise the standard of education for their pro- 
fession. This pecuniary argument, there- 
fore, may safely be regarded as one of only 
temporary and limited force. The other 
objection is a sentimental one. It is said 
that the requirement of a degree for admis- 
sion to all professional schools would ex- 
clude some young men of remarkable pow- 
ers who have had no opportunities in their 
earlier years to obtain a good, systematic 
education. The obvious answer to this ob- 
jection is that the organized institutions of 
education are not planned for geniuses, and 
that geniuses do not need them. Moreover, 
it is not supposed that all the professional 
schools of the country would make this 
requirement. There would doubtless be 
plenty of private-venture schools in all the 
large cities which would receive young men 
of an appropriate age without the slightest 
inquiry into their preliminary education. 
That is the case to-day, and the proposed 
change in university policy would, of course, 
56 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

be an advantage to such schools. The 
question before us, in this Department of 
Higher Education, is what the universities 
ought to do. I urge that the universities 
should maintain each its present standard 
for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, but 
should permit young men who are capable 
of reaching that standard in three years of 
residence to take the degree in three years; 
and, secondly, that, with notice of not less 
than four years, they should require some 
bachelor's degree in arts or sciences for ad- 
mission to their professional schools. The 
long notice will enable parents, schools, and 
the whole community to adapt themselves to 
the change. The greater the number of 
universities which unite in this movement, 
the more easily will it be brought about. 

It will be observed, perhaps, that I have 
said nothing about the degree of Bachelor 
of Science or Bachelor of Philosophy. My 
reason is that I regard those degrees as only 
temporary and inferior substitutes for the 
traditional degree of Bachelor of Arts. I 
believe that these lesser degrees will dis- 
appear as soon as an adequate variety of 
studies is allowed to count toward the de- 
5 57 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

gree of Bachelor of Arts. Toward this ad- 
mirable consummation the Harvard Faculty 
have already taken some important steps. 
Thus, many college studies can be counted 
toward the degree of Bachelor of Science; 
and many of the studies originally intro- 
duced into the University through the Sci- 
entific School may be counted toward the 
degree of Bachelor of Arts. Again, in 1903 
and thereafter, the requirements for admis- 
sion to the Scientific School represent as 
large an amount of work done at the sec- 
ondary school as the requirements for ad- 
mission to Harvard College, although the 
number of options is larger in the Scientific 
School requirements. A very moderate in- 
crease in the number of required studies for 
admission to the Scientific School, and in 
the number of optional studies allowed for 
admission to Harvard College, would make 
the requirements for admission to the two 
departments identical. For a time, in the 
development of the American universities, 
there was a strong tendency to multiply 
bachelor degrees. For ten years past the 
tendency has been all the other way. Until 
this simplification is brought about, how- 
58 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

ever, the requirement for admission to the 
university professional schools will have to 
be a bachelor's degree in arts or sciences, 
this description including the miscellaneous 
degrees in letters, philosophy, engineering, 
etc. 

Finally, if a degree in arts or sciences is 
to be required for admission to university 
professional schools, the road to such a de- 
gree should be as smooth and broad as pos- 
sible. No exclusive prescriptions should 
obstruct it; and the various needs of the 
individual pupil should be carefully pro- 
vided for in both school and college. 



59 



THE LENGTH OF THE 
COLLEGE COURSE 

BY 

ANDREW R WEST 

DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL, PRINCETON UNIVERSITY" 



THE LENGTH OF THE 
COLLEGE COURSE 1 

The American college is the vital center 
of our system of higher education. With 
all its imperfections, it serves, as probably 
no other institution can serve, to uphold the 
standards of the secondary schools and to 
lift from below the level of professional 
schools. It occupies an intermediate field of 
its own, not perfectly denned, but as clearly 
defined as the fields of our secondary or pro- 
fessional education. It should be allowed 
and encouraged, as they are, to organize 
itself completely and efficiently according 
to the laws of its own life, without curtail- 
ment or encroachment. Otherwise we shall 
be in the absurd and uncivilized position of 
refusing to try for the best college educa- 
tion, and shall be sacrificing to commercial 
and utilitarian demands the one educational 

1 Read before the National Educational Association (Depart- 
ment of Higher Education) at Boston, July 7, 1903. 

63 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

agency most needed to purify and elevate 
the too materialistic tone of our American 
life. 

By tradition the length of the college 
course is four years. This is almost uni- 
versal. There seems to be no good reason 
a priori why it should have been four, rather 
than five or three, or even two. But the 
practical unanimity of the tradition indi- 
cates that thus far, at least, the period of 
four years has been found to be well suited 
to our needs. Analyze this as we may, it is 
a definite result of long and wide experience 
and one which should not be discarded with- 
out the fullest consideration. 

It is argued, however, that conditions are 
changing and that a shorter time must be 
allotted if we would save the American col- 
lege. This argument rests mainly on the 
increasing age of the student at entrance to 
college and the lengthening courses of the 
professional schools. The fact that college 
graduates are kept back from entering busi- 
ness life until they are twenty-two need not 
disturb us on economic grounds, because it 
is also a fact that the marked increase of 
college graduates in business life has coin- 
64 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

cided with the very period in which the age 
of graduation has been rising. But for 
those going into professional life the case 
is different. Taking eighteen as the aver- 
age age of entrance to college, adding four 
years of college and three or, as it may soon 
be, four years of professional study, the 
young doctor or lawyer is not fledged until 
he is twenty-six. A year, or even two years, 
may be saved by reducing the length of the 
college course. 

Let us admit, at once, that we are facing 
a serious economic question. The saving of 
a year or two in time and money will in 
many cases settle the question as to how ex- 
tended an education a young man can get. 
Young men who must get to law or medi- 
cine by twenty-four must forego something 
if they enter college at eighteen. No de- 
vice will secure them eight years of educated 
life in six. The brighter and more mature 
among them may perhaps save a year by 
entering college at seventeen. But this does 
not meet the general difficulty. If by any 
chance they enter at sixteen, they will be 
found as a rule too immature mentally for 
the studies and too immature morally for 
65 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

the life of our larger modern colleges. This 
solution may therefore be dismissed as in- 
sufficient and unwise. If the year or two 
years is to be saved, it must be taken in most 
instances from the college or from the pro- 
fessional school. 

We may as well admit that in such cases 
the college must suffer the loss, because the 
intending doctor or lawyer can not escape 
the demands of the professional schools. 
His livelihood is conditioned on completing 
his professional education, and this settles 
the matter. 

But does it settle the general question of 
the proper length of the college course for 
those who have time to take it? What are 
we to do with the mass of students who can 
take four years of college? Why must 
their course be shortened? It is a minority 
which goes on to law and medicine. Some 
better reason must be found than the fact 
that a part of this minority can not remain 
four years. If it were true, or if it becomes 
true, that the majority of young men suit- 
able for college can not stay throughout 
the present course, then it may be a shorter 
course must be established. Otherwise it 
66 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

does not appear that we are doing a wrong 
to students by holding them four years, 
unless it can also be shown that a three-year 
or a two-year course is intrinsically better 
than a four-year course for American young 
men. 

This is to me the one question of real 
difficulty. I am unable to see that young 
men generally will be better trained to 
begin as lawyers at twenty-four than at 
twenty-five or twenty-six. I am able to see 
that many can not afford to wait so long, 
and must take what they can get in the 
shorter time. It is clear that some of them 
can not take four years in college. It is 
also clear that giving them the bachelor's 
degree at the end of two years or three years 
will not give them an education of four 
years. It is the time taken, as well as the 
studies taken, that counts heavily if a per- 
manent impression is to be made. Extended 
time in residence given to unhurried study, 
and not rapidly formed acquaintance with 
a series of studies, is what is needed. And 
when we realize with what imperfect train- 
ing so many boys come from the schools, it 
may easily take four years to outflank their 
67 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

deficiencies, correct their methods, and de- 
velop even a semblance of liberal culture. 

Why, then, if some of them must leave 
college, should they not leave, as some now 
do, at the end of two years or three years, 
taking with them their valuable half -loaf or 
three-quarters loaf of college life and train- 
ing? It is worth a great deal to them. 
They will find most of the professional 
schools ready to receive them, and some of 
them ready to give, if not the very best, at 
least a good professional education. The 
best of everything in education can not be 
had without taking the best time needed. 
In fact we are exaggerating the situation, 
for if all professional schools would merely 
go so far as to exact at least two years of 
college as prerequisite to entrance, there 
would be a gain the country over in the 
quality of professional students. It may, 
perhaps, be thought that the three-year 
course will bring more students to college 
and more college graduates to professional 
schools. This is a matter of pure specula- 
tion. But suppose it does. Is it clear that 
we need more college students with shorter 
education than they have now? Is it clear 

68 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

that we need proportionally more doctors 
and lawyers? The desired gain in quality 
of professional students can be secured 
without destroying the four-year course, 
merely by exacting generally three years 
of college as a minimum entrance require- 
ment. Has any American university gone 
farther than this in dealing with the stu- 
dents of its own college who enter its own 
law or medical school? 

In the present condition of affairs in our 
land, viewed in its entirety, the question of 
entrance to professional schools and the 
question of the proper length of the college 
course are two distinct questions. By all 
means let there be a few leaders among the 
professional schools exacting a college de- 
gree for admission, especially if it be pos- 
sible to secure this on the basis of a full 
college course completed in the full time 
without haste or crowding. The time may 
perhaps come when all good schools will be 
able to follow their example. But it has not 
come yet. 

If, therefore, the college course is to be 
shortened, it should be because the shorter 
course is intrinsically better for the mass of 
69 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

college students. Is four years of Ameri- 
can college education better than three? 
Few will doubt it is better than two. Three 
years or four is the real question. 

That a change of profound importance 
has come over our colleges in the last thirty 
years none will deny. It is a change in 
tone and spirit. The gains in diversified 
opportunity and in student self-government 
have been immense. There have also been 
losses. In the large older colleges particu- 
larly there has been an accession of students 
who are attracted more by the social and 
athletic life than by studies. There has 
been a relaxing of effort, a disposition to 
look on college life as a pleasant social 
episode. The old-fashioned college with its 
simple programme of prescribed studies is 
gone. The so-called " elective system " has 
come in to replace it, wholly or partly. To 
rehabilitate the old state of things is im- 
possible and undesirable. To endure the 
disintegration and confusion in intellectual 
standards which has ensued is also unde- 
sirable and, I believe, impossible. The 
strength of opinion favorable to the four- 
year course is found to be greatest where a 
70 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

large basis of prescribed studies has been 
kept. The arguments for a shorter course 
are most influential where elective freedom 
prevails most. It is possible to argue with 
much effect for four years when it can be 
shown that a fine education is given be- 
cause of the very definite correlation of 
studies to one end — namely, the acquaint- 
ing of young men not only with the meth- 
ods of knowledge, but with the substance 
of things important for all liberally edu- 
cated men to know, the elemental things 
which, taken together, represent the stock 
and staple of our intellectual inheritance as 
a race. This takes considerable time. Sup- 
plement this with a first exploration into the 
fields, or, far better, into some definitely 
mapped field of elective freedom corre- 
sponding to the well-ascertained aptitudes 
rather than the chance likings of the stu- 
dent, and four years will be found none too 
much. A natural break between the two 
lower and two upper years may thus easily 
be made. At this time, if the hard neces- 
sity arises so soon, let men leave who must 
leave early. The bachelor's degree may 
then be kept for those who do the full work 
71 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

in the normal time. From this point of 
view the four-year course is in every way 
worth maintaining. 

But if the principle is to prevail that, 
once in college, the student is to find all 
studies elective, the case is very different. 
No definite programme is completed for the 
mass of students so far as concerns the spe- 
cific substance of what they study. And 
without this an important common element 
is subtracted. A certain effect is lost. The 
common area of liberal culture, in which all 
educated men should be at home, tends to 
shrink and vanish. The solidarity of the 
student community, the intense esprit de 
corps which accompanies movement by col- 
lege classes, the intimacy of the community 
in things of common intellectual acquaint- 
ance — all these are weakened by dispersion. 
The students are not traveling near enough 
in the same direction to be within easy hail 
and call. Such a condition is anomalous 
in education. Secondary education below 
gains its effect from the correlation of pre- 
scribed studies, so as to form a general 
gymnastic of the mind. Professional edu- 
cation above is unattainable without the 
72 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

mastery of correlated subjects prescribed 
for all. The inner relations of the subjects 
studied, and not the preferences of imma- 
ture minds, form the basis for an organized 
course of study, and should have much to 
do, perhaps most to do, with determining 
the length of any course. College educa- 
tion alone, under the plan of free election, 
is being allowed to wander aimlessly, as 
though there were no general and necessary 
rational relations according to which college 
studies should be combined as they are in 
other fields of education. The student's 
preference, so often determined by inade- 
quate knowledge or an easy-going follow- 
ing of the line of least resistance, is digni- 
fied by the name of " election," and the 
bewildering mass of elective studies offered 
him is seriously called a " system." " Sys- 
tem " it may be to others, but not to him. 

How can a definite argument for a dis- 
cipline and culture of four years, rather 
than of three years, be erected on such a 
basis ? We need not waste time in exploring 
the tangle of inner reasons which indicate 
that the indefiniteness and heterogeneity of 
a free elective course may be a proper, even 
6 73 ' 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

an urgent, reason for shortening it. The 
mere fact that the movement for a three- 
year course is strongest where elective free- 
dom is least restricted is enough indication 
that a powerful cause operating inside the 
college course to shorten it is the inability 
of a purely elective scheme to fill out four 
years with profit to the mass of students. 

If the proposal were made to change a 
four-year course in elective studies to a 
three-year course with a large basis of pre- 
scribed studies, I confess the three-year 
course would seem to me a marked improve- 
ment. And unless something is done to 
reduce the tangle to order, the three-year 
course seems to be inevitable in some places. 
But if the proposal be to reduce the other 
type of four-year course to three years, then 
the loss is not only unnecessary, but is in 
every way undesirable, because it means the 
loss of the crowning year in a definitely 
rounded plan, the consummate college year 
of intellectual development, privilege and 
satisfaction. 

On the colleges, therefore, which believe 
in maintaining a large basis of prescribed 
studies as the one sure foundation for a 
74 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

rational plan of subsequent elective studies 
will rest the duty of maintaining a four- 
year course. They will need to make sure 
that they work out their programme in true 
accordance with their academic confession 
of faith and secure to their students at all 
hazards the few fundamental studies, well 
and amply taught. They will need to be 
resolute in teaching young men that there 
is no real education without well-directed 
effort; that it is not doing what a man likes 
or dislikes to do, but the constant exercise 
in doing what he ought to do in matters of 
intellect as well as of conduct, whether he 
happens to like it or not, that turns the 
frank, careless, immature, lovable school- 
boy into the strong, well-trained man capa- 
ble of directing wisely himself and others. 
If they fail to do this with measurable suc- 
cess, they fail to justify their contention. 
If they succeed, the American college course 
of traditional length and largely prescribed 
content may be trusted to justify itself 
triumphantly. 



75 



THE LENGTH OF THE 
COLLEGE COURSE 

BY 

WILLIAM R. HARPER 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO 



THE LENGTH OF THE 
COLLEGE COURSE 1 

In view of the time allotted, I limit my 
statement to the presentation of some con- 
siderations which appear to me to be dis- 
tinctly opposed to the proposition to make 
three years the normal period of residence 
for the college course instead of four. 

Some students are, unquestionably, able 
to complete the course in three years. 
About the same number should perhaps, to 
do the work equally well, take five years. 
The question before us, however, is not one 
that relates to a small proportion of the 
students who enter college — the very bright- 
est or the very dullest. It is a question 
which has to do with the normal college 
course — that is, the course of study intended 
for the average student. 

It is easy to point out the origin of the 

1 Read before the National Educational Association (Depart- 
ment of Higher Education) at Boston, July 7, 1903. 

79 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

difficulty which confronts us and has given 
rise to the proposition itself. It is a sur- 
vival of the old idea which made the college 
curriculum something rigid, something into 
conformity with which every student must 
be brought, rather than something which 
should be made to conform to each indi- 
vidual student. It is not inconsistent with 
this suggestion that the first discussion of 
the question took place in an atmosphere 
friendly to the elective policy in distinction 
from the policy of a fixed curriculum. 
Adaptation to the needs of the individual 
along certain lines did not in this case carry 
with it flexibility and adaptation in other 
lines. It is not an adaptation of the college 
course to the needs of individual men to 
propose that the course shall be a three-year 
one. An adaptation would permit four 
years for those who need four years, five 
years for those who need five years, and 
three years for those who are able to do the 
work in three years. 

1. The proposition for a three-year course 
is based upon the supposition that the en- 
tire work of the college course is really 
university work. This is a mistaken sup- 
80 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

position. The work of the freshman and 
sophomore years is ordinarily of the same 
scope and character as that of the preceding 
years in the academy or high school. To 
cut off a full year means either the crowd- 
ing of this higher preparatory or college 
work of the freshman and sophomore years, 
or the shortening of the real university work 
done in the junior and senior years of the 
college course. The adoption of either of 
these alternatives will occasion a serious loss 
to the student. The average man is not 
prepared to take up university work until 
he has reached the end of the sophomore 
year. No greater mistake is being made in 
the field of higher education than the con- 
fusion which is coming to exist between 
college and university methods of work. 
The adoption of a three-year college term 
will only add to a confusion already great. 
2. The suggestion rests upon an incorrect 
idea as to the age of students beginning 
work. The average age of students enter- 
ing college to-day is about the same as it 
was twenty-five and fifty years ago. The 
average age of students leaving college to- 
day is about the same as it was twenty-five 
81 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

or fifty years ago. The serious difficulty 
lies in the fact that the demands of pro- 
fessional education are greater to-day than 
they were twenty-five or fifty years ago, 
and that, instead of courses of professional 
study extending over two years, we are con- 
fronted with courses of professional study 
extending over three or four years. It is a 
point of special interest, however, that, al- 
though the requirements for entrance to 
college are so much greater than they were 
in former years, the student masters these 
requirements and enters at practically the 
same age. In other words, better educa- 
tional facilities have made it possible to 
graduate the young man at the same age, 
but with nearly two years of additional 
work. With all this gain it is apparent to 
any student of the situation that even yet 
there is great waste, and that a better ar- 
rangement of the curriculum in the earlier 
stages of educational work will make it 
possible for one or two additional years to 
be gained. With the multiplication of high 
schools and their greater efficiency, and with 
the consequent improvement in the gram- 
mar schools, much may be expected. It is 

82 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

reasonable to suppose that a practical limit 
has been reached so far as concerns the re- 
quirements for admission to college. With 
this limit fixed, it is not unreasonable to 
expect that on the basis of the present re- 
quirements a boy may reach college one or 
two years earlier within the next decade. 
This will counterbalance the increase of time 
required in the professional schools referred 
to above. It is therefore unnecessary to 
shorten the college course merely to provide 
for an extension of the professional course. 
3. The proposition is based upon a wrong 
idea of the high school. This institution is 
no longer a school preparatory for college. 
In its most fully developed form it covers 
at least one-half the ground of the college 
of fifty years ago. It is a real college; at 
all events, it provides the earlier part of a 
college course. Its work may not be sepa- 
rated from that of the freshman and sopho- 
more years either in method or scope. Many 
high schools are actually moving forward 
to include in their curriculum the work of 
the freshman and sophomore years. In 
these schools the entire college course, as it 
was known fifty years ago, besides the addi- 
83 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

tional work in science which at that time 
was unknown, is included. This develop- 
ment of the high school has a significant 
bearing upon the question before us. How 
is this new college, the product of our own 
generation, to be brought into relationship 
with the old college which has come down 
to us from our ancestors? The correct ap- 
preciation of the modern high school and its 
proper adjustment to the situation as a 
whole makes strongly against the proposed 
three-year course. 

4. The adoption of the three-year policy 
by the larger institutions would be followed 
immediately by an increase of requirements 
for admission to the first year of college 
work. This fact is seen in the history of 
the college of the Johns Hopkins Univer- 
sity. While high schools as such show a 
tendency to increase the scope of their work, 
and while this tendency is certainly to be en- 
couraged, such increase should be accepted 
as a substitute for the work of the college, 
but not as an additional requirement for 
admission to the college. Our present dif- 
ficulties have their origin partly in the fact 
that from time to time we have increased 
84 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

the requirements for admission to college, 
until, as has already been pointed out, a 
fairly good college course of instruction is 
now obtained before the so-called college 
work begins. This is an evil which should 
be corrected, and its correction lies in the 
direction of reducing the requirements for 
admission rather than in increasing them. 
The evil would be intensified by the adop- 
tion of the three-year policy. 

5. The proposition is based upon the 
supposition that the time requirement is the 
essential thing. Starting from the tradition 
that the college course must be four years 
for all men of whatever grade, it proceeds 
upon the assumption that, for various rea- 
sons, this period, now the same for all stu- 
dents, must continue to be the same for all 
students, namely, the three-year period. No 
idea has exerted a more injurious influence 
in the history of the college work than that 
the period of four years, however employed, 
if spent in college residence, guaranteed 
a college education. It i-s questionable 
whether the time limit in the undergraduate 
course is any more important a factor than 
the time limit in the work for the doctor's 
85 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

degree. This fondness for a time limit, 
which is the fundamental basis of the three- 
year proposition, is a survival of the old 
class system which disappeared long ago in 
the larger institutions, and is beginning to 
show decadence even in the smaller insti- 
tutions. 

6. The proposition is likewise to be op- 
posed because of its deleterious influence 
upon the smaller colleges. The American 
college is the glory of American spiritual 
life, and its existence must not be endan- 
gered. Granting that the larger institu- 
tions could adopt without injury the three- 
year plan, it would be impossible for the 
smaller colleges so to do. Two things would 
follow: (a) the decadence of the better col- 
leges of this class, and (b) the adoption of 
the policy by colleges only slightly above 
the grade of high schools. When it comes 
to be seen that the college system is adjusted 
in its entirety with a view to its relationship 
to the professional schools, and that it is 
only a second college course following a 
first college course already received in the 
high school, the tendency will be to go di- 
rectly from the high school to the university 

86 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

— a tendency to be discouraged as urgently 
as possible. Moreover, the colleges of lower 
grade will at once reduce their period to one 
of three years, even though their curriculum 
be greatly inferior to that of the larger in- 
stitutions. In other words, the step pro- 
posed, in spite of protestations to the con- 
trary, means, in the end, a lowering of 
requirements throughout the field of higher 
education. 

7. Less than four years for a boy who 
enters college at the right age, sixteen or 
seventeen, is too short a time. The adop- 
tion, however, of the three-year course will 
compel every boy to limit his college course 
to three years. This is a serious difficulty. 
On the present basis he may take one, two,i 
three, or four years, according to circum- 
stances. On the new plan he would be lim- 
ited to three years, so far as college work is 
concerned. With the immense increase in 
attendance at college which has come within 
the last decade on the four-year basis, why 
should we deliberately plan to reduce the 
time to three years? Surely a preparation 
will be needed in the years to come as full 
and long as in the years that are past. 
87 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

The one place in which it is unnecessary and 
undesirable to cut down the time of those 
who are willing and able to take four years 
is in the college period. Let the time be 
shortened in the earlier years, but at this 
stage of preparation, with the great num- 
ber of subjects which may profitably be con- 
sidered, let us have all the time possible. 

8. The suggestion of the third-year 
course ignores the culture value of the sub- 
jects in the first year of professional work. 
For my own part I can not conceive any 
work more valuable to a young man or 
woman, from the point of view of citizen- 
ship and general culture, than the first year's 
work in the curriculum of the law school, 
the medical school, the divinity school, or 
the school of education. In any one of these 
groups the student is brought into contact 
with living questions. The fact that the 
method of professional schools is different 
is, in the majority of cases, a distinct advan- 
tage, and in no case an injury, since it serves 
as a corrective of a tendency toward dilet- 
tanteism unquestionably encouraged by the 
more lax methods of the later years of col- 
lege work. If any one question has been 

88 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

settled in the educational discussion of the 
last quarter of a century, it is that a line is 
no longer to be drawn between this class of 
subjects and that, on the ground that one 
group, and not the other, may be regarded 
as culture-producing. The opportunity to 
elect subjects of this character in the last 
year of the college course does not injure 
the integrity of the college. It must be 
confessed that the adoption of this policy 
by larger institutions introduces a difficulty 
for the smaller institutions, but this diffi- 
culty is not insuperable, and several ways 
have been already suggested for meeting it. 
9. The proposition, as already hinted, 
subordinates the college almost wholly to 
the professional school. It is largely be- 
cause of the increased demands of the pro- 
fessional schools that it seems necessary to 
shorten the college course. This does not 
seem to be in harmony with the fact that a 
comparatively small number of students 
really expect to enter professional schools. 
Why should students who do not have the 
professional school in mind be required to 
shorten the term of college residence? If 
it is answered that the student who enters 
7 89 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

any line of business activity needs the year 
thus saved in order that he may begin his 
work earlier, it may be said that the facts 
do not bear out this proposition ; and, in any 
case, a year of business is not to be treated 
as a year of college work in the sense that it 
is equivalent to the first year's course of 
study in a professional school. It is there- 
fore as inexpedient to adjust the whole col- 
lege policy to the supposed needs of a 
minority who are planning to enter the pro- 
fessional school as it is to adjust the whole 
policy of a high school to the needs of a 
minority who enter college. 

10. In conclusion it is to be urged in op- 
position to the proposed movement that it 
is in general contrary to the drift of educa- 
tional movements, and that the very thing 
which it proposes can easily be secured by 
other means. Among other educational 
tendencies to-day may be cited (a) that of 
the high school to enlarge its scope and add 
to its curriculum one or two years of addi- 
tional work; (b) that of strengthening of 
the faculties and curriculum of the average 
smaller college; (c) that of avoiding the 
waste in the earlier years, and the conse- 
90 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

quent possibility of college entrance at an 
earlier age; (d) that of distinct separation 
between college and university methods. 
To each and all of these the proposition 
stands opposed. 

Following the example of one of the 
speakers this morning, I would suggest that 
the plan which has been in operation at the 
University of Chicago for nearly ten years 
has seemed to many of us to meet in large 
measure the demands called for this morn- 
ing. This plan provides a course of four 
years and a course of two years. It permits 
students of exceptional ability to do the 
work in three years. It makes it possible 
for those who so desire to prolong the work 
to five years. It is adapted to the needs of 
individual or different classes. With the 
completion of the two-year course a certifi- 
cate is given, granting the title of Associate 
in the University. This, for the present, is 
sufficient in the way of a degree. To stu- 
dents who maintain a standing of the high- 
est grade certain concessions are made. 

The details of the plan have been worked 
out as experience has indicated the need. 
The provision of a two-year course meets 
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PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

the need of many who can not take a longer 
term of residence, and likewise of many who 
ought not to take a longer course. The pro- 
vision of a normal four-year course meets 
the need of the average man or woman. 
This plan does not imply that this average 
man or woman who spends four years in 
residence is particularly stupid, or that a 
year has been wasted. 

It is believed, from an experience of ten 
or more years, that it contains the solution 
of at least many of the points now under 
discussion. 



92 



THE LENGTH OF THE 
COLLEGE COURSE 

BY 

NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER 

PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



THE LENGTH OF THE 
COLLEGE COURSE 1 

In my judgment most participants in 
the discussion now going on throughout the 
land as to the length of the baccalaureate 
course and the preparation for the pro- 
fessional schools err in supposing that the 
two questions are necessarily reducible to 
one, and also in taking hold of that one by 
the wrong end. The nature, content, and 
proper length of the baccalaureate course 
are matters quite independent of the proper 
standards of professional education and are 
entitled to consideration on their own merits. 

The one question to which the two are 
usually reduced is taken hold by the wrong 
end when it is said that the baccalaureate 
course should be of a stated length, say four 
years or three years, and that everything 

1 Read before the Department of Higher Education of the 
National Educational Association, at Boston, on Tuesday, 
July 7, 1903. 

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PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

else in education and in life must adapt 
itself accordingly. Those who take this 
stand give us no clear notion of ( 1 ) where 
the baccalaureate course begins, (2) what it 
consists of, or (3) what it exists for. They 
assume that all of these points are clearly 
understood and generally agreed upon. 
Nothing could be farther from the truth. 
Not even the so-called reputable colleges 
are in anything approaching agreement as 
to the standard to be enforced for admission 
to the baccalaureate course; and while there 
is an external pretense of unanimity as to 
what the baccalaureate course exists for, 
that course is, nevertheless, in too many in- 
stances, fearfully and wonderfully made. 
Dr. Wayland said, over sixty years ago, 
that " there is nothing magical or impera- 
tive in the term of four years, nor has it 
any natural relation to a course of study. 
It was adopted as a matter of accident, and 
can have, by itself, no important bearing 
on the subject in hand." To suppose that 
a four-year baccalaureate course is neces- 
sary semper, ubique, ab omnibus, is to ele- 
vate an accident to the plane of a principle. 
Others take hold of the question by the 
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PEE SENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

middle. They fix an arbitrary age at which 
professionally trained men should be ready 
for active work in life, and after subtract- 
ing the sum of the years that they propose 
to allot to the elementary school, the sec- 
ondary school, and the professional school, 
the remaining years, three, or perhaps two, 
are held to be sufficient for the college. 

Both of these methods appear to me to 
be arbitrary and unscientific, although the 
former is the usual academic mode of set- 
tling the question and has behind it the 
support of uncritical public opinion. 

One of the worst of all educational evils 
is that of quantitative standards, and it per- 
sists surprisingly in the discussion of college 
and university problems. Every higher 
course of study that I know of, except only 
that of graduate work leading to the degree 
of doctor of philosophy at the best uni- 
versities, is primarily quantitative. These 
courses are all based on time spent, not upon 
performance. The adjustment of the pe- 
riod of work to the capacity of individual 
students, now so common in elementary 
schools and not unusual in secondary 
schools, is almost wholly absent from the 
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PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

colleges. The " lock-step " is seen there to 
perfection, and class after class of one hun- 
dred or even two hundred members moves 
forward (with the exception of a few de- 
linquents) as if all its members were cast 
in a common mold. The place of the bacca- 
laureate course and its standards will never 
be established on sound principles until the 
question of its length is made subordinate 
to those relating to its content and its pur- 
pose. Moreover, it is quite unreasonable to 
assume that the baccalaureate course should 
be of one and the same length for every- 
body. By the term ". baccalaureate course " 
I mean those liberal studies in the arts and 
sciences that naturally and historically fol- 
low the secondary school period. 

My own views on the questions at issue 
are, briefly, these: 

1. The baccalaureate or college course of 
study of the liberal arts and sciences should 
be preserved at all hazards as an essential 
part of our educational organization. It is 
distinctively American and a very powerful 
factor in the upbuilding of the nation's cul- 
ture and idealism. It should be treated as 
a thing of value in and for itself, and not 
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PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

merely as an incident to graduate study or 
to professional schools. 

2. The college course is in serious danger 
by reason of the fact that the secondary 
school is reaching up into its domain on the 
one hand and the professional school is 
reaching down into it on the other. Purely 
professional subjects in law, medicine, en- 
gineering, and architecture are widely ac- 
cepted as part of the baccalaureate or col- 
lege course by university colleges, and now 
independent colleges in different parts of 
the country are trying various devices with 
a view to doing the same thing. If this 
tendency continues unchecked, at many in- 
stitutions there will soon be little left of the 
old baccalaureate course but the name. 

3. To preserve the college is (a) to fix 
and enforce a standard of admission which 
can be met normally by a combined ele- 
mentary and secondary school course of not 
more than ten years well-spent, and (b) to 
keep out of the baccalaureate course purely 
professional subjects pursued for profes- 
sional ends by professional methods. The 
college course, in other words, should be 
constructed for itself alone and for the in- 

L of C. vv 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

tellectual, moral, and spiritual needs of the 
youth of our time, without reference or 
regard to specific careers. This course must 
be widely elective, and so offer material to 
enrich and develop minds of every type. 
This course is the best preparation for the 
professional study of law, medicine, divin- 
ity, engineering, architecture, and teaching, 
simply because it does what it does for the 
human mind and the human character, and 
not because it is so hammered and beaten 
as to serve as a conduit to a particular 
career or careers. 

4. This course should be entered upon 
at seventeen, or in some cases at sixteen. 
Eighteen is too late for the normal boy; the 
boy who has had every educational advan- 
tage and is not ready to meet any existing 
college entrance test before he is eighteen 
has been dawdling and weakening his men- 
tal powers by keeping them too long in 
contact with merely elementary studies. 

5. For the boy who enters college at 
seventeen and who looks forward to a ca- 
reer as scholar, as teacher, or as man of 
affairs, four years is, ordinarily, not too long 
a time to spend in liberal studies. On the 

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PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

other hand, the boy who, entering college at 
seventeen, proposes to take up later the 
study of a profession in a university, ought 
not to be compelled to spend four years 
upon liberal studies just at that time in his 
life. To compel him to do so is to advance 
the standard of professional education ar- 
bitrarily without in any way raising it. It 
is a fallacy to suppose that the more time 
a boy spends in study the more he knows 
and the more he grows. Whether he grows 
by study depends entirely upon whether he 
is studying subjects adapted to his needs, his 
interests, and his powers. Pedagogues sup- 
pose that the more time a boy spends in 
school and college the better; educators 
know the contrary. There is a time to leave 
off as well as a time to begin. A boy can 
develop intellectual apathy in college as 
well as knowledge, weakness of will as well 
as strength of character. 

6. The earlier parts of professional 
courses in law, medicine, engineering and 
the like are most excellent material for the 
boy of nineteen or twenty. He should be- 
gin them at that time and complete his four 
years of professional study by twenty-three 
101 



PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

or twenty-four. To postpone his profes- 
sional course later than this is not only to 
waste his time, but to waste his mind, which 
is far worse. 

7- There should be a college course two 
years in length, carefully constructed as a 
thing by itself and not merely the first part 
of a three-year or a four-year course, which 
will enable intending professional students 
to spend this time as advantageously as pos- 
sible in purely liberal studies. The uni- 
versity colleges can establish such a course 
readily enough; the independent colleges 
will have to establish such a course or see 
their influence and prestige steadily decline. 
To try to meet the new situation by simply 
reproducing all present conditions on a 
three-year scale instead of on a four-year 
scale is a case of solvitur ambulando. The 
shortening of the college to three years for 
all students involves an unnecessary sacri- 
fice. As usually defended this policy in- 
volves no educational principle, but merely 
concedes a year of liberal study to the mod- 
ern demand for haste and hurry. 

8. Whether the completion of such a two- 
year course should be crowned with a de- 
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PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

gree is to me a matter of indifference. 
Degrees are the tinsel of higher education 
and not its reality. Such a two-year course 
as I have in mind would imply a standard 
of attainment at least as high as that re- 
quired for the degree of A. B. in 1860, 
which had many characteristics that we of 
to-day persistently undervalue. If this dis- 
cussion could be diverted from degrees to 
real educational standards it would be a 
great gain. The compromise plan as to 
degrees, now becoming so popular, whereby 
the baccalaureate degree is given either for 
two years of college study and two years 
of work in a professional school or for three 
years of college study and one year of work 
in a professional school, is disastrous to the 
integrity of the college course. It delib- 
erately shortens the college course by one 
year or two while proclaiming a four-year 
college course. It is a policy that only uni- 
versity colleges can adopt; independent col- 
leges must suffer if it becomes a fixed and 
permanent policy. 

9. The most difficult point to establish, 
apparently, is that at which the baccalaure- 
ate course should begin. Colleges with 
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PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

courses nominally four years in length are 
admitting students with from one to two 
years' less preparation than is demanded by 
other colleges with four-year courses. The 
lax enforcement of published requirements 
for admission, together with the wide ac- 
ceptance of certificates from uninspected 
and unvisited schools, has demoralized col- 
lege standards very generally. It does not 
make much difference how long the bacca- 
laureate course is if it does not begin any- 
where. 

10. A university ought not to admit to 
its professional schools students who have 
not had a college course of liberal study, or 
its equivalent. A minimum course of two 
years of such study should be insisted upon. 
A four-year course should not be required 
for the two reasons (1) that it delays too 
long entrance upon active life-work and 
(2) that it does not use the time and effort 
of the intending professional student to the 
best advantage. 

11. For a university to admit professional 
students direct from the secondary schools 
is to throw the weight of its influence 
against the spirit and ideals of college train- 

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PRESENT COLLEGE QUESTIONS 

ing, and to prepare for the so-called learned 
professions a large body of very imperfectly 
educated men. To say that any other pro- 
cedure is undemocratic is not only a grave 
misuse of words, but is to imply that the 
universities should not struggle to give this 
democracy what it most needs, namely, well- 
educated and highly trained professional 
service. 



a) 



105 



NOV 81 1903 



